'Reg' a part time bouncer who has helped Paul Parker of the Red Squirrel protection unit culling grey squirrels in Northumberland. Photograph: Gary Galton

In Rochester, Northumberland, the last village before Scotland, Rupert Mitford, the 6th Baron Redesdale, and Paul Parker, a pest controller, are examining a map. We are in Redesdale's kitchen, in a cottage that borders the Otterburn army base. Chinook helicopters fly low up the valley, the last stop before Helmand and Basra. Redesdale and Parker, however, are organising battle lines of their own.

Redesdale, in a lived-in tweed jacket, eventually locates his home on the well-used Ordnance Survey. 'This house was ground zero,' he says. 'In the first six months we had cleared everything to here,' he gestures towards a wooded area to the south. 'May to June we got down to this line here. July we did Newcastle.'

Parker, shaven headed, chips in, in his broad Geordie, tracing his finger along the Tyne. 'We were doing the damage in this area. They can swim, but they'd rather use the bridges. We hammered them here and here and here. Now we are really hunting them down in ones and twos.'

Redesdale continues, with boyish excitement. 'We developed what we called our killing strategy. Hit them in the woods. Dipton Woods: we took 2,000 out. If you clear a woodland you suck all the surrounding population to it. Then you hit them again. Suck 'em in, hit them.'

'Slaley Forest,' Parker says. 'We took 3,500 out of there. In the winter there's no cover and you can pick them off with the .22 rifle. They all get together in the cold. You can get eight or nine with a couple of shots. All huddled together. We just annihilated them.'

Redesdale is a tall, consummately charming, slightly distracted man, who attended public schools in north London and studied archaeology at Newcastle. He can trace his bloodline back to the Norman conquests; the Mitford sisters were his great aunts. Having been relieved of his hereditary peerage in Blair's reforms, he became the youngest elected life peer and is now, at 41, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for the environment in the second chamber. Parker, who grew up in the west end of Newcastle, was not much for school. Once he was seven or eight he was off in the fields, rabbiting, shooting crows and starlings and selling them to local butchers for pies. He and Redesdale, who rents him a house up the road, are an unlikely double act. Together, camouflaged crusaders, they form the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership.

This is not a resurgent Tufty Club. 'We only call ourselves the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership because if we called it the Grey Squirrel Annihilation League people might be a bit less sympathetic,' Redesdale announces, chuckling. 'But we do nothing with red squirrels apart from save them by killing grey squirrels!'

In the two years of their existence, Redesdale and Parker have been remarkably successful. While other conservation groups go in for education or re-habitation, they favour genocide. With a recruited army of 900 volunteers - grannies and game wardens, families and farmers - they have slaughtered 19,500 grey squirrels in the past 18 months and claim to have cleared England's northernmost county of the rodent. The grannies, Redesdale suggests, tend to be the most bloodthirsty trappers. 'It's like: "Can you beat it to death with a hammer and let me watch?" We had one old dear who went inside and came back out with a sort of elephant gun: "Do you want to shoot it with this?"'

Parker and Redesdale are now making plans for Yorkshire, if they can find funding. Parker really dreams, however, of getting down to London, 'taking out - what is it? - Hampstead Heath, the parks. Hit them in their own backyard.' This, Redesdale adds, despite the fact that his partner gets a nosebleed if he leaves Northumberland, and on the one occasion he tried London had a panic attack on the tube. Even so, the baron does not rule out the capital. Lately, he confesses, he has been testing kill traps in Tufnell Park.

I first met Redesdale a few weeks earlier, in the House of Lords' tearoom. There he explained how his private army came together. A couple of years ago, he said, he felt he had been lacking purpose in his life. He had the peerage, his work, his wife, Helen (a lawyer), four wonderful kids, a house in north London, and the cottage and several hundred tenanted acres in the valley that bears his name, but he was lying awake wondering about the meaning of it all. 'Now,' he said, trying to suppress a giggle, 'I lie awake working out how to kill squirrels.'

A man needs a hobby. In this case it began when Redesdale was asked to make a speech in the Lords about the plight of the red squirrel in March 2006. He had spent every summer of his childhood, the second youngest of seven children, and the only boy, in the woods around the cottage in Rochester; since these were strongholds of the red squirrel he knew a good deal about the subject. Most of all he knew, as every English schoolboy knew, how the native red thoroughbreds had been forced back by the rapacious American greys and now stood on the edge of extinction.

The debate itself proved a catalyst in Redesdale's thinking. It was moved by Earl Peel, who described the red squirrel as 'an iconic creature, immortalised by Beatrix Potter'. These days, however, Peel went on, 'Squirrel Nutkin must think to himself, "How could it have all gone so wretchedly wrong for me?" Why couldn't he, like Tommy Brock, have employed a top public relations firm and secured himself as a logo for a major conservation body?'

The grey squirrel was presented by Peel as the scourge of all right-thinking people, carrier of the brutal squirrel pox which wiped out any reds that came into contact with it in days. A scavenger, it was the black-eyed destroyer of trees and bird populations. Peel ended with an impassioned plea. 'Walking as I do through St James's Park from time to time, I cannot help noticing the absence of common or garden birds. Where are the tits?' he asked. 'Where are the warblers?'

Redesdale picked up in the debate where Peel had left off. 'In Regent's Park,' he began, 'a grey squirrel came up to my son and me and actually climbed up my leg to look in my pocket...' Before he was able to add 'in search of nuts', Lord Hoyle butted in. 'In St James's Park one ran up my trouser leg and bit me!'

These peer-bothering trouser rats were even now on the march. 'I have some woodland in Northumberland that has red squirrels,' Redesdale went on. 'Last year, however, we found our first grey squirrel - it had been killed in the road - so it will surely not be too long before the grey squirrels arrive. I am just on the edge of Kielder Forest, and it is very depressing to think that that last bastion is under threat...'

Of course, no pillar of the establishment likes to see bastions threatened and this roused others to the fray. Lady Saltoun of Abernethy, who had red squirrels dancing on the lawns of her estate, had no doubt what we were dealing with. 'Red squirrels are rather like quiet, well-behaved people,' she observed, 'who do not make a nuisance or an exhibition of themselves, or commit crimes, and so do not get themselves into the papers in the vulgar way grey squirrels do.'

The grey squirrels' celebrity-seeking hoodie behaviour was the least of it. Battalions of vulgarian American rodents were fanning out across Europe. Lord Chorley, who wondered if he might be the only member present who had taken tea with Beatrix Potter herself, in 1941 (she put him in mind of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle), spoke darkly of how, contrary to what the New Labour government had recently claimed, grey squirrels were right now massing on the continent. 'There are three colonies, if that is the right word, in Italy. At least one of them is in the process of crossing the Alps. If they get to Germany there will be a complete invasion taking place.'

By the time Lord Inglewood took the floor, emotion was running high. 'Squirrels are said to be good to eat,' he declared. 'The great chef Brillat-Savarin created a banquet of grey squirrels stewed in Madeira, together with partridge wings en papillote and roast turkey.' Mr Jamie Oliver had to be summoned. Inglewood finished with a stirring call to arms. 'The red squirrels have had Chamberlains and not Churchills!' he cried. 'But it is Churchills that they need!'

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Rupert Redesdale is far from a bloodthirsty fellow - he had never killed anything in anger since he had been on Operation Raleigh in Africa in his gap year and it had been his turn to throttle a chicken - but something about the squirrels' plight stirred old emotions in his blood. He was a Mitford after all.

It was, he decided, not just the pox that was killing red squirrels, it was bureaucracy. A whopping £626,000 of Lottery money had recently been awarded to a group called Save our Squirrels, drawn from various nature conservation agencies, but the money had been given on the understanding that none of it would be used to pursue what seemed to be the only hope of salvation for the beleaguered native rodent: it could not be spent on culling greys.

Redesdale spoke to the relevant office at Defra to point out the absurdity of this. There were more than 2m greys and only, at best, 160,000 reds. Appeasement was not an option. Defra suggested to him that as they were coming to the end of their budgetary year there might be some funds available. So Redesdale sat up over the following weekend and produced a grant application. It was a strange kind of document. In the space marked 'turnover' he wrote 'nil', in that for 'product' he listed 'dead squirrels'. Still, he got the money, nearly £150,000 of it, and then sat at his kitchen table and worked out how best to spend it.

The original plan was to start lots of little squirrel groups all over the county, spread the word about the danger and get people to start trapping. In the event, Redesdale, a man who never quite seems in control of his laughter, found he was spending more time on team-building than on carnage. Save our Squirrels wanted to be involved. They had four full-time squirrel preservation officers who came to meetings.

There was much discussion about whether it was possible to use the 'k' word - 'cull was OK, kill apparently was not,' Redesdale recalls. There was fear of reprisals. At the first board meeting of the RSPP they spent an hour discussing what they would do when the first death threat came in. 'We decided we were quite lucky because they had just arrested most of the Animal Liberation Front,' Redesdale remembers. (They have so far received four letters of complaint, one suggesting a grey squirrel zoo.)

Just when he was starting to despair, however, Redesdale met Paul Parker. The pest controller was of the opinion that 'you can be through the area and have cleared it of squirrels by the time you have bought the biscuits for a coffee morning'. They worked on a new foolproof trap, and found a local man to knock up 1,000 in his shed. And it was then, Redesdale recalls, that they really started motoring.

There are some pest control vans that favour discretion. The kind that, if parked in a restaurant car park, might keep the patrons guessing about their purpose. Paul Parker's van is not one of those. On back and sides, in the largest possible type, are the words 'Bees, wasps, bed bugs, squirrels, fleas, cockroaches, rodents, rabbits. You hate them, we love them!' There is, too, a squirrel hotline number. If a grey is spotted anywhere in the county, Parker will be on its case immediately with his traps and his rifles. In this way, he reckons, he has been covering up to 4,000 miles in a week.

At any moment his phone could ring and we could be off to Hexham or Corbridge. From six in the morning people start calling and they don't stop until late at night. 'At 11 o'clock they've just come in from work, and there's a squirrel in the trap, they want me to shoot it. I can have 10 to do before I wake up in the morning.'

This morning, however, Parker's phone is stubbornly silent. There is, it seems, not a squirrel to be shot for 50 miles in any direction. We set off anyway on Parker's regular rounds, checking traps for nuts, catching up with his volunteer army, and while we drive he recounts tales of more memorable mornings. There was the drive-by shooting near Blaydon: 'We were doing about 40 and there's a grey by the side of the road, brushing its hair: I lined him up with the air rifle, bang, straight through the chest.' And Stumpy, the last grey in Slayley, who had lost half his tail. 'He was a swine, took us a couple of weeks to get him. We just fed him, waited until he eventually dropped his guard, and then: bam!'

Parker is a superstitious man. In particular he will not pronounce the name of his most resolute adversary. When they crop up in conversation, rats are thus always 'long tails' or 'tin hats'. ('Pig' and 'monkey' are problematic words for him in this regard, too.) As we drive over bridges, he somewhat disconcertingly lifts his feet from the car's pedals. 'Devil's water,' he says.

Mrs Sanderson, in Hexham, is a kindly looking woman, and at 82 the oldest volunteer in the RSPP. She is also among its most successful squirrel catchers. Over the past year or so she has taken about 40 squirrels from the trap under her bird table, though more, she muses, if you count all the nursing mothers among them. 'There would be the starving little ones with those, too, I suppose.'

She remembers the days when the reds used to come to the back door of her council house. She hasn't seen one for years, but at least the traps give her something to watch with her breakfast. 'You are just willing them to get in there,' she says of the greys, 'when they come sniffing around, destroying everything.' At first, when Parker came to shoot a squirrel she wouldn't watch. But now she does. 'I give him a bag to carry them out in, too,' she explains. 'Actually it's one from the RSPCA.'

I mention that a colony of unusually large black squirrels, a colour mutation of the grey, is establishing a stronghold in Cambridgeshire, because the females there seem to prefer the muscular new breed. Mrs Sanderson winces at the idea. Last night she dreamt that she opened her front door and there were two red squirrels on the steps there talking to her. 'They will come,' Parker reassures her, 'don't you worry.' Since the grey squirrel cull, red squirrels have started re-establishing themselves all over the county. One was recently seen in Jesmond Park in Newcastle. 'It gives people round here hope,' Parker observes, 'and they will be back here, too.'

We wander out to inspect Mrs Sanderson's trap, in vain. We move on, scanning the horizon, in search of the last grey squirrel in Northumberland.

By mid-afternoon we are at a quarry with Reg Ord, another member of Lord Redesdale's squirrel army. Ord, 42, is an infamous bouncer in Newcastle's Bigg Market (a 'nightclub ejection technician,' he suggests). As broad as he is tall, with a neck like a sack of cement, Ord's day job is manning a Tarmac weighbridge. The company gives him an hour a day for conservation projects - the certificates are on the walls of his Portakabin. In corners of the quarried land Ord thus puts out strips of tin to attract newts - 'mostly palmates', Ord says, 'plus the odd great-crested' - and he shoots squirrels. He's had 500 since he started, just around the site here, but none today.

Parker suggests this is a sign they are winning, but Ord is not happy. Thing is, someone has been messing with his traps. Stamping on them, driving over them. He shows us the flattened items at the back of his Portakabin, all the while recounting tales of his history as a doorman. 'I've been shot at and stabbed and hit with lumps of wood and bricks and bottles. They only ever try it once, mind. Bloke phoned me up three in the morning, told me how he was going to shoot me, the calibre of the rifle and all. The police wanted me to wear a vest, but I had an idea who it was. Next time he came in the bar I really gave it to him...' Ord recalls the encounter with some relish. 'Had no calls since.'

If you had a hankering to liberate grey squirrels, I can't help thinking, it is probably not Reg Ord's squirrel traps that you would choose to stamp on first. Does he have an idea who is doing it?

'I've got my suspicions, but you cannot prove nowt. I'll find out though. And when I find the fucker, he'll have it, too.'

We drive on. Parker's phone sits on the seat beside him, mute. The story is the same with all the other trappers we meet. On the way home, at the bridge near Corsham, after a squirrel-free day, Parker lifts his feet from the car pedals. 'Devil's water,' he says.

The longer you spend in Northumberland the more you realise what a very long way from anywhere else it is. The Observer's photographer, Gary Calton, and I are staying in a curious country house hotel in Otterburn that was recently converted into a hostel for asylum seekers. When there was a local protest at the prospect of the incomers, however, it reverted to being a hotel. We are the only guests. They are preparing for a wedding at the weekend, at which all of the party will be dressed in orangutan costumes.

Overnight, I begin to develop a theory that the suspicion about incomers has also fuelled some of the zeal of the squirrel operation. The greys, adaptable and robust, are evidence of Darwin in action. They hugely outbreed the reds - four to eight in a litter, three or four times a year. They also out-eat them. Reds, vegetarians, need a lot of seeds. The greys will eat anything. They will take mince pies from children's hands. In Scotland they will drink Irn Bru. There was a story of squirrels addicted to crack cocaine in Brixton.

If there is a class war aspect to this struggle, the aristocracy brought it on themselves. The first grey squirrels came to Britain as amusing mementoes of the New World in the early 19th century. The gentry kept them in cages as pets. It is thought that in 1876 a Mr Brocklehurst, who had brought a pair over from America, released them to see how they would fare in the wild.

With all of this in mind I go to sleep thinking even the House of Lords can't stop evolution. The following morning, though, Redesdale puts me right.

'Your problem is that you have never seen a red squirrel,' he says. And it's true, I haven't. 'The first time you see a red squirrel you will get it immediately. The hairs stand up on your neck. Half the primates in the world are about to go extinct and here is an extraordinary animal native to this country that is about to disappear because we can't be bothered to save it. Paul and I have proved it can be done. The RSPCA says what we do, though legal, is unethical; Save our Squirrels call us cowboys. But how can it possibly be ethical to let a wonderful native animal be lost to future generations for ever?'

Parker, still in his combat gear, is teary-eyed when it comes to reds.

'I think they are mystical animals. There is something so spirited about them; I saw my first one back in the Seventies, but every time they still affect me the same way. To think they have been here since the Ice Age and we might be seeing the last of them here is something I really don't want to think about.'

The news has been carrying items about how the ancient red squirrel population in Formby, Lancashire, has been quickly devastated by squirrel pox with the arrival of the grey. The conservation groups had given red squirrels 10 years in Northumberland; Redesdale reckons they had four, tops. Now at least they have a fighting chance. 'We have to keep vigilant,' he says, 'have to keep pushing the greys back.'

Having failed to find a grey squirrel to shoot yesterday, today we are going in search of a red squirrel to photograph. The grounds of Eshott Hall in the northeast of the county are considered a good bet. For several hours, therefore, Gary and me and Paul Parker and Redesdale study the tree canopy for the movement of red squirrels - unlike the grey they rarely come to ground, and when they do they move like quicksilver.

Eventually, with legs cramping up, we spot a pair high up in the tree under which we are crouching, whispering. Redesdale and Parker are right, it is a perfectly charged moment (though partly a relief to see any squirrel at all). Smaller than the greys, the red squirrels chase each other across the high branches. When they sense us they stop stock-still, and then they chatter furiously. Parker says it has been like this on the few occasions he has had a red in the traps. When he has let it go it has been away like liquid, but has always stopped halfway up a tree to fix him with a stare and chunter at top speed. 'It's like, "Hey mate, you got the wrong man there."'

Watching these squirrels Parker becomes reverential, almost spooked. 'The greys are just tin hats really. They are nothing like the reds. You see a red and every one is different, they have individual characters. Sharp eyes, little tufts on their ears. They respect the place they live in. A grey squirrel is just a grey squirrel.'

Wondering whether it is possible for a squirrel to show respect, we leave Eshott and go in search of a fabled man who feeds red squirrels from his hand in Kielder Forest. We are led to his cottage at the side of Kielder Lake by word of mouth. Everyone knows the squirrel man. And when we get there we immediately see why he has his reputation.

Having spent most of the day scanning treetops for red squirrels, suddenly they are everywhere, standing on their hind legs, hopping up to the cottage door. Don Clegg is a retired woodwork teacher with a hint of red about his beard. There have been squirrels coming down from the forest here for 20 years. At the moment they have about seven that arrive for monkey nuts every morning and in the afternoons. Over the years the numbers have dropped, but now they are coming back again.

Clegg is all for Redesdale's campaign. They had Bill Oddie up here but, like the squirrels, like the SOS group, like the Wildlife Trust, he sat on the fence, wouldn't say that killing greys was the answer. To Clegg it's a no-brainer. What does he think makes the reds so special?

'It's simple really,' he says, 'it's just like they belong here.'

That evening over supper, Redesdale tells some tales of his Mitford aunts in their natural habitats. His relations with them were distant but formative. Jessica told him not to be so stupid when he boldly announced he wanted to be an army chaplain at the age of 16; Debo, Duchess of Devonshire, recently invited them all to tea at Chatsworth and they fretted about taking their son who was in the middle of potty training; Redesdale's father was absolutely scared stiff of Nancy. All the time he talks, though, the conversation comes back to squirrels. I wonder if he has ever eaten any. Somewhat sheepishly, he admits he hasn't. It seems to me the next day might be a good moment to start.

We meet Parker in the morning behind enemy lines near the Angel of the North. On this side of the Tyne there are still plenty of greys and he has put some traps down here to assess the reserve strength of the population. He has his daughter Bronwyn with him in the van. 'She loves to tell her friends at school what she gets up to with her dad and the squirrels,' Parker says proudly. 'I don't,' says Bronwyn flatly.

We walk up a hillside in the woods, checking traps. Two contain squirrels, both juvenile males apparently, anxiously checking the mesh for an exit. Parker takes them back to the van.

'I shoot them in the back of the head,' he says. 'You have to shoot them just behind the ear. If you hit them in the middle of the skull you can miss the brain.'

He lets them into the killing trap and trains an air gun through the mesh. The car door is open and a Queen CD is playing. As the squirrels find their way over to the gun barrel, 'Don't Stop Me Now' is booming. As squirrels number 19,547 and 19,548 are dispatched, thick blood seeping from their wounds, 'Another One Bites the Dust' might seem more appropriate.

Parker puts the carcasses in the back of his van. He's had a call from Mrs Sanderson, who has caught another squirrel in her trap this morning, and we are to meet Lord Redesdale at her house. 'We are like the fourth emergency service,' he says.

Along the way, Parker discusses the possibilities for a new kill trap that will dispense with the need for shooting. It's like a huge mouse trap, he says, but they have had a few near misses with fingers in setting it up, so it's not quite right yet.

I wonder if he has a sense that the squirrels know they are being hunted now?

'When it gets down to the last few in a wood, I'd say definitely,' Parker suggests. 'When they are on the back foot they all know about it. Then it's a question of getting into their minds, under their skins.'

At the back of Mrs Sanderson's house another squirrel, out-thought, is awaiting its fate. Redesdale is already there and Parker suggests that he takes the shot.

'If I must,' he says. He stands over the cage and shoots the squirrel, with some aplomb, from the hip. Blood stains Mrs Sanderson's patio, but she's impressed.

'My, you are a good shot,' she says of Redesdale's marksmanship from two inches.

'Well, he's a lord, he has to be,' Parker observes.

We all stare down at the squirrel, just now a livewire. 'When you start you get very nervous. But after a while you get to know how to relax into it,' Redesdale says.

The first 17,000 are the worst, I suppose.

The peer is confident there was no suffering. 'It was a bit bothered, but it wasn't too bothered, and then it was dead.'

It is decided with something just short of enthusiasm that we will have the squirrels for tea. For a year now the RSPP has been supplying Ridley's Fish and Game of Corbridge with dead squirrels, and a market has developed for the meat. Parker gets 75p a squirrel and David Ridley, who runs the business, sells them oven ready at £2.25 wholesale, £3.25 over the counter. There has been a good deal of mail-order interest, mainly from restaurants and individuals in London. Over the summer demand has far outstripped supply.

The only problem, Ridley suggests when we get there, is that unlike rabbits, squirrels take a long time to skin. One of his skinners has it down to a fine art. He blowtorches them first to get rid of the fleas and then gets to work on the fur. Even so it still takes three minutes per animal.

That skinner is not around today so Parker does the squirrels himself on a bench alongside a deadpan pigeon plucker. While Parker tears at the squirrels' stubborn skins, David Ridley discusses ways of cooking squirrels. 'They have no fat on them and they live mostly on berries and nuts so the flesh is sweet. I've roasted them. I've flash-fried them with fresh thyme.' One restaurant has done well with a confit of grey squirrel served with pine nuts; Ridley and Redesdale have been discussing the possibility of the canapé market. And yes, each squirrel they sell does indeed have to carry the label 'May contain nuts'.

Back at Redesdale's cottage, we present him with the flayed rodents, now under cellophane. He looks at them with forced cheer.

There must be times when he regrets becoming the squirrels' champion.

'It's like everything,' he suggests, smiling. 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'

Is that how Helen, his wife, feels about it, I wonder. Over the past couple of days she has offered an affectionately ironic chorus to her husband's obsession.

'There is,' she says diplomatically, 'no doubt they are doing brilliantly for the reds, but it can take over rather.'

'I'll cook 'em!' Redesdale suggests brightly, before displaying a rather worrying unfamiliarity with the hob controls.

Eventually the squirrel sizzles dutifully in the pan. Small tufts of fur still cling to its flanks. Redesdale pokes at it with a spatula and laughs a little nervously.

'What is it?' asks his elder daughter.

'It's squiwwel!' her sister confirms.

'Perhaps I should have quartered it,' Redesdale says. The skinned squirrel lies spatchcocked on its back, paws upwards.

Paul Parker is due but there is no sign of him; Bronwyn, who has joined us for supper, suggests he is feeling a little tired. Or maybe he's sampled Redesdale's cooking before.

At the stove, Redesdale discusses other media opportunities. 'We have been approached to do a TV series,' he confesses. 'BBC3 I think.'

It might, I suggest, make a nice antidote to Springwatch - Northumberland Slaughter

'Isn't BBC3 the comedy channel?' Lady Redesdale wonders, drily.

Redesdale serves up the squirrel. He cuts a piece off and tucks in with some bravado, offering a commentary while chewing. 'This is the saddle. It's not bad, there's no fat on it.' In a reluctant John Selwyn Gummer moment he feeds a little to his children, and gives a sizeable pink-looking haunch to me. We all chew ruminatively on the slightly raw squirrel and think for a moment. 'It tastes like chicken,' we agree.

'Very good chicken,' Redesdale suggests, optimistically. Not for the first time, his wife raises an eyebrow.

On the draining board two more skinned rodents are waiting to be cooked. The more he eats, though, the more Redesdale brightens. 'This is rather wonderful,' he declares. 'We can now officially eat them into extinction!' He returns to the flesh and bones on his plate with the look of a man who has woken with the solution to a problem that had troubled him the night before.